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Just something to think about when purchasing a barrel. This information was pulled off of Lapco's web site December, 2005.

Raw aluminum is poured into ingots the size of telephone poles. The mill (meaning aluminum producer not one of our
machines) scrapes all the oxidation off the outside, losing a lot of material. Cheap providers don't cut the oxidation off and just
use the ingot as is. The ingot is then cut into smaller pieces and forced through an extrusion mill. Similar to making macaroni
out of play-dough. The material is then heat treated and provided to us as uniform homogeneous high quality military grade
billet extruded material.
Other manufacturers either use the cheap material with the oxidation becoming occlusions that show up as gritty patches or
even seams or cracks in the barrels. You can't sort the barrels before final plating because only the acid in anodize will expose
the contamination. Most of these manufacturers won't even inspect the barrels again or if they do won't throw them out over a
"little rough spot". On top of this 90% of manufacturers don't have solid material extruded but instead have tubing made. This
way they don't have to spend time drilling the material and many of them don't even hone it. They just pass a polishing brush
through the pipe to make it look a little shinier.
Now having tubing made doesn't seem like such a bad idea until you find out how tubing is extruded. Just like the play dough
machine squeezing material through a hole to make solid spaghetti, but with one very important difference. In order to make
the tubing there are 2 dies used, one in front of the other. The first one has 5 holes that the material comes through around the
center, creating the hole. Then these 5 slices go through the second die and get welded back together to form the tube.
How solid, round, or strong do you think this makes their material? What about seams? What about the fact that concentricity
tolerance on tubing is +/- 10% of the wall thickness? The wall on barrel tubing before it's machined is .156 of an inch so
concentricity can be off .0156 of an inch. Now that's only 5 human hairs. How much of a difference can that make? Well .015
over the average barrel of 12 inches when expanded to a target 100 feet away can make your shot off by 1.5 inches. Not too big
a deal so far. However that .015 off center condition means one side of the barrel is .015 thinner and the other is .015 thicker.
That's .0312 difference in wall thickness. Still doesn't sound like a big deal, right? Well please realise that .031 is 1/32 of an
inch. Imagine what 1/32 of an inch step will do to a paintball as it enters the barrel. Imagine how this off center condition will
also guarantee that the end of the barrel will release the ball on one side first. If the ball is still touching the barrel on one side
when it leaves it can pick up a spin. This is where wild fliers come from, the one ball that seems to have a direction of it's own.
When we get our material we cut it to length into barrel blanks. Our barrel blanks are 1/16 of an inch bigger in diameter than
anyone else. This is so that we can cut off any dent's or scratches that may have happened to the material in shipping and so
that we can guarantee concentricity. We then GUN DRILL our barrel blanks in the same way that precision sniper rifle barrels
are made for our Special Forces. We drill our barrels to leave one and a half thousandths of an inch of stock on the inside
walls of the barrel, that's half a human hair. When you drill 14 inches deep the drill WILL walk and exit off center but not anymore
than the tubing guys. However, our oversized material comes to the rescue. We set up our barrels between precision center
and machine the outside to be concentric to the inside. All this work gets us a 14 inch piece of "Super Precision Barrel Blank".
It even looks like a piece of tubing but it's not. The material is pure and consistent and the concentricity is within .0005 and
that's 1/2 of one thousandth of an inch.
Now we are prepared to make a barrel. We put this barrel blank into a half million dollar German 10 Axis machining center and
machine the barrel from 1 setup. This is to insure that human error doesn't interfere with our precision. This insures that our
threads, ball entry, and exit are perfectly on center. It also insures something that most manufacturers don't even pay attention
to and that is balanced gas flow through the porting. By machining everything from one setup we can perfectly balance our gas
flow so that the gas exits the porting evenly and does not put biased pressure on the ball causing a spin. When you look at
most manufacturers barrels you will see jagged edges around their ports so not only is the airflow not balanced but the jagged
edges are causing turbulence.
The next step in manufacture absolutely must have human intervention, that is honing. Honing is an art as well as a science.
Our barrels are bar honed 3 times. First they are automatically roughed to get them close to the size (rough is a relative
because we are only removing .001 from the barrel wall). Then they are semi finished to remove .00025 from the wall, that's
one-tenth of a human hair. Finally they are finished by a master honer to better than glass quality finish and perfect sizing. The
art in honing comes from the fact that removing that last bit of material is a breathtaking experience. The stones load up with
the aluminum grit and change their coarseness. Also it takes a very fine touch to take those final few passes because any
wrong pressure will cause an out of round condition or leave a drag mark when the barrel is removed from the mandrel. Our
experts balance and batch their work so that they do the finishing work only at just the right time to get the best finish in the
industry.
We guarantee the size of our barrels by using "non contact Air Gauges". These gauges measure the size of the barrel by
putting a probe into the barrel that is literally a couple of hairs smaller than the barrel so that it doesn't touch the bore and
blowing air through the gap. By sensing the flow of air through this gap we can measure the size of the barrel within .00001 of
an inch. We can rotate the barrel as we measure to see how round it is and we slide the probe up and down to make sure that
there are no tight or loose spots in the barrel. Take a look at the ocean waves in your barrel and think about what that "squeeze
play" is doing to your balls, airflow and "cleanability".
All these precision honed barrels then go to our meticulous quality control department for 100% inspection. They will be
inspected 3 more times. After the 1st inspection the barrels go to polish after which they are inspected again to make sure the
finish is up to standard and to make sure the polisher didn't drop the barrel, ding the threads or somehow damage the bore.
Next the barrels go to plating for Military Class III anodize which is almost diamond hard, so that our barrels are 5 times more
scratch resistant than most of our competitors. Our competitors use the cheaper and softer colorful "Decorative Commercial"
anodize. After anodizing, we perform a proprietary final polish on the bore and cleaning of the barrels. Then the barrels go to
be laser engraved and for final inspection. Finally they are packaged for sale and shipped to our loyal distributors. So next time
one of your friends asks you why you don't have fruity colorful pipe on the end your gun you can tell them "I want to hit what I'm
aiming at, every time."

Accuracy through never ending meticulous attention to detail. We wouldn't have it any other way. We just make the quality of
stuff that we want to play with and good enough never is.

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